Dr. Sotomayor is an associate professor and librarian of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He served as the 55th (2021-2022) President of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), the premier international organization for Latin American and Caribbean librarians, archivists, book dealers, and culture professionals. He obtained his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago, and currently holds additional faculty appointments in the Departments of History, and Spanish and Portuguese. He is an affiliate faculty member at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Lemann Center for Brazilian Studies, and the Center for Global Studies, at the University of Illinois. His book entitled "The Sovereign Colony: Olympic Sport, National Identity, and International Politics in Puerto Rico" won the 2017 José Toribio Medina Book Award. His research focuses on the cultural and political history of the Spanish Caribbean, particularly on issues of nationalism, colonialism and imperialism, identity politics, and international relations, through the prism of sport. He is the co-editor, with Dr. Cesar R. Torres, of "Olimpismo": The Olympic Movement in the Making of Latin America and the Caribbean" (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2020), which was a finalist for the Best Anthology award from the North American Society for Sport History (NASSH). He is currently working on a monograph that studies the intersections of religion, sport, and imperialism through the YMCA in turn of the twentieth century Puerto Rico and Cuba. His research also includes genealogy, family history, anthroponymy, heraldry, and genetic genealogy. He has taught Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago, and at Knox College in IL, and has presented his work at the Conference on Latin American History, the Latin American Studies Association, the Society for Caribbean Studies, and the Puerto Rican Studies Association, among others.

Andrew L. Johns is Professor of History at Brigham Young University and the David M. Kennedy Center for International Studies. His research focuses on the history of U.S. foreign relations, with a particular interest in the presidency and the nexus of domestic politics and foreign policy. He is the author or editor of six books: The Eisenhower Administration, the Third World, and the Globalization of the Cold War (2006); Vietnam’s Second Front: Domestic Politics, the Republican Party, and the War (2010); Diplomatic Games: Sport, Statecraft, and International Relations since 1945 (2014); A Companion to Ronald Reagan (2015); The Cold War at Home and Abroad: Domestic Politics and U.S. Foreign Policy since 1945 (2018); and The Price of Loyalty: Hubert Humphrey’s Vietnam Conflict (2020). In addition, he is past president of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association and has served as editor of Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review since 2011.